The articles and essays in this blog range from the short to the long. Many of the posts are also introductory (i.e., educational) in nature; though, even when introductory, they still include additional commentary. Older material (dating back mainly to 2005) is being added to this blog over time.

Friday, 31 October 2014

Thomas Nagel as Philosopher-Priest & New Mysterian

[Written in 2001.]

There
are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They
make themselves manifest.
They are what is mystical.

.....there
are desires and sentiments prior to reason that it is not appropriate
for reason to evaluate...

Nagel, The
LastWord,
1997, 107)

My
reason for taking the following approach to Thomas Nagel’s objectivism and
metaphysical realism comes from certain comments he makes in The
View from Nowhere
(1988, 11-12). In that book he says that his philosophy is driven by his
moral feelings. Some may say that there is nothing strange with that
in the field of ethics
itself; though what if Nagel’s “desires and
sentiments” are responsible for his metaphysical and
epistemological positions too?

Take Nagel’s pronouncements and
compare them with Michael Ayers comments in his book on Locke. In it
he writes that it is “absurd” to think of “a particular moral,
political or religious orientation’s motivating a theory of
knowledge or being” (1991, 1:8).

So this essay
is not an analysis of Nagel’s positions within metaphysics and
epistemology. It's an examination of how he may hold such positions.
It's not to the point, therefore, to say that I don’t offer a good
analysis of, say, Nagel’s positions on necessity, objectivity or
“pre-linguistic concepts”. Such analyses are not part of my
intention in the paper. I want to explain why he holds such
positions; not whether his positions have argumentative power.

This means the work is also speculative and psychological. Speculative because I
haven’t got access to Nagel’s mind; and psychological because his
behaviour (that is, his linguistic behaviour) is not the issue.

In
Nagel’s case there seems to be a kind of pragmatism in the air. In
fact precisely the kind of pragmatism that Nagel argues against when
displayed by philosophers like Rorty and Putnam. What I mean by this
is that one could take Nagel’s quote (which opened this
introduction) to be an acknowledgment that one’s metaphysics and
epistemology should simply be the handmaidens of one’s political or
moral hopes. (This was what Kant more or less said, in his Critique
of Pure Reason, of
moral philosophy’s relation to metaphysics and epistemology and
Aquinas said, in Summa
Theologica, of logic
and philosophy’s relation to theology.). That is, if certain moral
and political “desires and sentiments”, which are “prior to
reason”, should not be “evaluated”, then they should be
defended all the way down the line of philosophical speculation and
analysis. And, as is clear, Nagel’s comments on logic, mathematics
and conceptual givens are simply the groundwork for positions in
politics and morality which he would deem much more important. That
is, the metaphysical and epistemological positions advanced in The
LastWord
are simply the substructure, which Nagel feels he needs to support a
larger political and moral edifice. (This is vaguely analogous to
Marx’s felt need to dispatch Hegel’s metaphysical position in
order to have a firm ground underneath the much more important stuff
on economics and politics.)

There is nothing new here. Kant the
transcendental idealist professor ended up believing exactly the same
things about God, immortality, freedom and morality as Kant the North
German Pietist who preceded him.

So just as some could say that Kant’s whole
philosophical enterprise was an attempt “to limit reason in order
to make room for faith” (and Bishop Berkeley's philosophical system was an
attempt to limit the pretensions of advancing materialist and
deterministic Newtonian science), so Nagel, through his anti-naturalism
(or mysterianism), is limiting philosophical naturalism (which, in
his view, includes pragmatism, positivism and the late Wittgenstein)
in order to make room for, amongst other things, the ineffable, the
necessary and non-linguistic “thought”.

To reiterate.
I shall not be directly commenting on Nagel’s stance on ethics
because, as I will try to make clear, what interests me are the moral
“sentiments and desires” and mystical yearnings which may drive
his epistemology, logic and metaphysics.

Nagel on Transcendence and Ineffability

It will become
clear that I’m trying to show Nagel as offering some kind of
mystical or quasi-religious line on philosophy. Take Nagel’s own
words:

"Rationalism
has always had a more religious flavour than empiricism." (1997, 130)

And
it's clear that Nagel is precisely the kind of rationalist he refers
to above.

Take Descartes being at his most dishonest when he smuggles
in God to tighten up his system (or take the idealist Berkeley
smuggling in God for similar reasons).

For instance, Nagel clearly
wants to downgrade the analysis of language (or at least language
use).
This is, after all, simply an empirical enquiry. He emphasises
instead the point that Fregean Thoughts, or his own “concepts”,
predate experience in a manner that roughly compares with Kant’s "a
priori concepts”. He is also a rationalist in the Cartesian sense
too. That is, the human subject can somehow unhook himself from the
rest of the empirical world (including his own body). And not even
the empirical data needed for such cogitations are of that much
importance when compared to the “order of reasons” which we must
“submit” to rather than “create” (1997, 143).

Nagel is searching
for the necessary, the absolute, and those aspects of the human mind
which we all share and those aspects of experience that are common to
all experiences. Such a search is essentially Kantian in form, if not
in content. It's a search for universals (which some would
argue has been definitive of Western metaphysics, otherwise what has
been the point).

But
what is it, precisely, that is “mystical” or “quasi-religious”
about all the above?

As I’ve just said, Nagel downgrades
experience, language and contingency. He is essentially stressing
those facets of reason and mind that we come into the world with.
The things that are built into us as human subjects in a manner
which, as I said, Kant would recognise. (However, Kant is far too
idealist for
Nagel.) And if these facets were there before language-use and all
other interactions with society, and indeed with any other human
beings, then they are closer to God and the Other World than they are
to the world of departmental seminars, raging hormones, book deals,
voting and tax forms in which Nagel, presumably, lives and breathes.
By tapping into these givens,
or simply by using or understanding them through realist analytic
philosophy, we are acknowledging God’s rather than society’s
gifts to us.

Even if Nagel is not - rather immodestly - placing
himself and selected other philosophers closer to God, he is in
effect celebrating the things God has placed within all of us. This
effectively means that by distancing himself from “time and chance”
he becomes closer and closer to the Eternal and the Necessary, which
are God’s good works. Contingency is, of course, the Devil’s
work. This is the platonist strain in Nagel.

So,
yes, bringing “God” and the Other World into the picture is
entirely speculative on my part, as I said in the introduction. Though
considering the fact that we have lived in a God-obsessed and
Christian culture for two thousand years, and, on top of that Nagel
himself must have been placed in a theist culture of some kind, then
my speculation may not be, as Kant (later) puts it, entering “the
void space of pure intellect”. Indeed some analytic philosophers
will probably regard this paper as one big ad hominem, with Nagel as
the victim. There is an element of the ad
hominem in the essay; though I don’t think that is the whole of the story.

There
are some things about Nagel’s position that are clearly more
“mystical” than “religious”.

Take his frequently reiterated
position on the “view from Nowhere”. Applied to his view of the
world and its relation to scientific claims, things don’t appear
particularly mystical. However, when Nagel says that he wants to “get
outside” of himself in order to “reach a descriptive standpoint
from which the first person has vanished” (1997, 114, 117). Of
course we need to ask if we're meant to take Nagel literally or
metaphorically. I think I've good reason to take him literally.
And, in any case, how would the metaphorical reading be cashed out?
Perhaps Nagel couldn’t even tell us. So if I take him literally, I
see shades of, amongst others, Plotinus (Irwin, 1989). Though whereas
Plotinus wanted to achieve harmony with what he called “the One”,
Nagel would like to achieve harmony with the perspective-free
internal and external world - the world we discover when we cleanse
ourselves of the “first person”. The world “as it is in itself”
is God to Nagel. Similarly, whereas Plotinus rages against
“plurality”, Nagel’s devil is contingency.
(Wasn’t “plurality” a consequence of contingency to
Plotinus, and, before him, Parmenides?)

To finish off on this note, I
would like to quote a poetic passage (for Kant) from the Critique
of Pure Reason:

"... Plato, abandoning the world of sense because of the narrow
limits it sets to the understanding, venture [s] upon the wings of
ideas beyond it, into the void space of pure intellect."
(Introduction, III)

I need hardly
say that I think that Nagel is similarly “abandoning the world”
of empirical or experiential reality and language because they're
inadequate to the task of providing us with necessity, certainty,
objectivity and other such holies. And he too, I think, ends up in
the “void space of pure intellect”.

Now
there's large problem for my position above: Nagel calls himself an
“atheist”. Though even if I don’t doubt his honesty (as Nagel
himself doubts the honesty of MacIntyre and the “ritualist
relativists and subjectivists”), this isn’t really a big problem.
The religious impulse can survive quite happily without the God of
monotheistic religions. All sorts of psychologists, psychoanalysts
and sociologists have written thousands of words on this very
phenomenon. They have shown us (if we needed to be shown) how hard it
is to throw off the baggage placed upon us by our parents and society
at large when we were young. My favourite example of this is the case
of Marxists. Haven’t many many Marxists, for example, treated Marx
as a god, Marxism as a religion and Das
Kapital as a Bible?
And the same may be true of Nagel. He has finessed mystical/religious
positions and made them more sophisticated. That is, he has expressed
them in the language-game of late 20th
century Anglo-American analytic philosophy. It’s a case of old wine
in new bottles; or, as Jacques Derrida would have put is, a good example of “sign
substitution” with content invariance.

Wittgenstein,
that is, the early
Wittgenstein, for once
(i.e., unlike the late Wittgenstein) provides Nagel with ammunition
to fight for the ineffability and transcendence cause. He sums up
Tractarian Wittgenstein as claiming that “what couldn’t...be said
was much more important than what could be” (1997, 127). For
Wittgenstein these ineffables were, amongst other things, “logical
objects”, logical relations, and the relations between empirical
propositions and the possibilities they represented. However, these
were simply the logical ineffables which, as it were, grounded
further much more important ineffables, such as the subjects who are
outside the world and who are themselves the foundations for moral
and aesthetic value judgements - judgements which we simply intuit or
feel (i.e., subjects not unlike Kant’s noumenal selves).

Nagel,
like the early Wittgenstein, doesn’t like too much talk. Too much
talk (or “chatter”, as Hugh Mellor puts it) ruins or destroys
the talked about. So let's try not to talk about, say, neurons and
synapses when we talk about the self. Let the self, unlike every
other thing in this gigantic universe, spring free of all casual
mechanisms. Though let it do so without too much talk. We intuitively
know it to be true. And talk could undo such truth. Only positivists
and "scientistic philosophers", after all, want to talk about
everything. Such people, Nagel may think, don’t recognise the soul,
or the soul’s calling, quite simply because they don’t have
souls. They are, instead, walking and talking organic algorithm-machines.

This
interest in the ineffable often goes alongside a belief in
philosophical depth.
The belief that philosophical problems are intrinsically deep. Nagel
himself notes that an old teacher of his, J.L. Austin, distrusted
depth; though “depth was what I thirsted for” (1995) . This seems to
mean that it was depth in
itself, of depth for
itself, that
interested Nagel; not the fact that depth was often simply an
accidental by-product, as it were, of philosophical problems.

What is “philosophical depth”? It can’t be a synonym for
“philosophical complexity”. Is it more, well, spatial than that?
Is it the reality under the appearance? The noumenal self under the
empirical self? The logical form under the grammatical form? The
essence under the accidents? The truth under the "simulacra"?

Depth is
something the priest gives us. Something beyond the trivialities and
superficialities. When we reach the depths we find “the meaning of
life” and “what it’s all about”. We find, also, essence,
necessity, the objective truth: all seen from the non-perspectival
and incredible View From Nowhere

Of course the
early Wittgenstein similarly “thirsted for depth” and
ineffability; though he came to believe that philosophers had in a sense
been mislead by this spatial metaphor (amongst others). Or, as
Terence Parsons puts it (about a slightly different subject) “[as]
half the rest of the [analytic] philosophical world have been telling
us, you can’t trust the ‘surface’” (37) I would put it more
prosaically. Perhaps there are no similarities whatsoever between the
analysis of, say, meaning or truth and the analysis of, say, an atom
or a cat. The only depth there may be is concrete spatiotemporal
depth. The rest is a lot of hot air.

Transcendence,
Ineffability and Philosophy

It
would be fair to say that philosophy for Nagel is for all intents and
purposes an instinct. That would be a rather innocuous and
uncontroversial position if it weren't for the fact that Nagel also
has a very precise idea
of what – real? - philosophy actually is. He thinks that there are
certain givens
of philosophical thought that aren't culturally or historically
variable.

Take another mysterian, Brian Magee, expressing something
similar; though more concrete than Nagel. This ties in with his idea that
thought can in fact transcend language. So it's understandable that
if Nagelian "concepts" can float free from the empirical
world (or at least are not dependent on it, whatever that could
possibly mean), it could easily follow that philosophical
contemplation does too:

"...the sources
of philosophy are preverbal and often precultural, and one of its
most difficult tasks is to express unformed but intuitively felt
problems in language without losing them." (1988, 11)

Nagel
never tells us what these "preverbal and often precultural
sources of philosophy" are. He doesn’t’ say what he
means by “thoughts” or give us any examples. Certainly not in TheLast Word.
It doesn't help either that he doesn't expand on enigmatic
statements such as "the
content of some thoughts transcend every form they can take in the
human mind" (1988, 102).

What he
appears to be saying (in the above) is that we must make a distinction
between the necessary and the contingent. Clearly the words and
languages we use to express "the sources of philosophy" are
contingent. However, these very sources appear to be necessary in a
quasi-Kantian sense. That is, the claim seems to be that all
human beings, as human beings, necessarily have a stock of
"intuitively felt problems". I must also deduce that Nagel
believes that these problems are in no way caused by our
conceptual/linguistic heritage. Language, therefore, is simply the
bodysuit that clothes a stock of thoughts that remains unchanged.

Nagel,
therefore, wants to stop the conversation. These “concepts” -
these “sources of philosophy” etc. - are what are objective. And if
they can be tapped into, expressed or seen (in the language-free
platonic sense), then objective truth (for these things are objects
of some kind) is possible. Tat’s what the realist analytic philosopher
wants. Not mere “warranted assertibility”, or instrumental or
pragmatic truth. He wants Truth which outruns all kinds of justification and
consensus. The truth of 1+1=2 and “the cat is on the mat”
which is also applicable to “There is a way the world is, and we
can capture the way the world is”, and “Killing unborn babies is
wrong”. The difference between the latter and the former is simply
one of degree, not of kind

This
is clearly another platonic or Cartesian attempt to escape from the
contingent and the empirical. Or, less rhetorically, it's also an
attempt to emphasise necessity
and essentiality - a
necessity and essentiality that's been given a hard time as a
result on the works of the logical positivists (e.g., Carnap), late
Wittgenstein, Quine and, of course, Nagel's “continental usual
suspects”.

Nagel
also stresses the permanencies of certain philosophical problems and
the ahistorical nature of basic concepts and reasonings.

Why,
then, does he say that “philosophy of this kind [analytic
philosophy] is usually a local phenomenon” (1995, 7)? I could
happily accept that this quote doesn't contradict his belief in
ahistorical concepts, etc; though how does it square with his strong
belief in ahistorical and “intuitively felt” philosophical
problems?
That is, problems aren't necessary consequents of ahistorical
concepts; though they may be the consequents thereof.

Forgetting
Fregean Thoughts and Nagelian “concepts” for a minute, Nagel also
has a high opinion of philosophy itself.
Or, perhaps I should say, a high opinion of “post-positivist”
Anglo-American analytic philosophy.
Perhaps I should qualify even more and say that he has a high opinion
of a particular kind of analytic philosophy (other than being
“post-positivist”): metaphysically realist and objectivist
Anglo-American analytic philosophy. (Perhaps there are only a few
philosophy departments who practice such things.) That is, the kind
of philosophy Nagel practices.

Such philosophy too aims at transcendence
because it “is after eternal and nonlocal truth” (1988, 10). His
kind of philosophy is opposed to “the weaker regions of our
culture” and the “ambient climate of irrationalism” (1997, 4).
Though it's not just the Derridas, Foucaults and Rortys who don’t
match up to his high standards, as I’ve hinted at; but “deflationary metaphilosophical theories like positivism and
pragmatism” (1988, 11) too. This would presumably include the late
Wittgenstein, Quine, Putnam, Nelson Goodman, Sellars, Churchland…the
list is long! Nothing but a strict Platonic/Cartesian ambition will
do.

Nagel
could never explicitly say that realist and objectivist analytic
philosophy should be both the judge and foundation of all other areas
of our culture; though I think that this is precisely what he believes.
And he does so because he thinks that others aren’t up to the job.
Other areas of culture are “weak”, “decadent” and simply
don’t have what it takes intellectually. Nagel says this is
because of the “extreme intellectual laziness of contemporary
culture” (1997, 6) in which there is a “collapse of serious
argument” (1997, 6).

One has to say here that Quine etc. were
indeed “deflationary” philosophers in certain senses; though
they lack “serious argument”? Derrida, if one ignores his
style for a moment, offered arguments (if not all the time). And the
place where I personally have come across a lack of argumentation is
when analytic philosophers are talking about Continental
philosophers. Then the gloves are well and truly off. Indeed Nagel’s
The Last Word
is hardly the most argumentatively rigouress book on the market. He
also likes the odd burst of “rhetorical flourish” too; though less so
when he's talking about Quine and more so when he’s talking about,
say, Foucault.(I'm also of the opinion, not based on very hard fact
but nevertheless derived from my experience of other analytic types
and especially analytic post-grads, that he hasn’t read a single
word of Derrida in the flesh; though he's probably read a few of analytic
philosophy’s “translations”.)

Transcendence,
Ineffability and Language

Nagel
rather revealingly (to me at least) often uses the word
“transcendence” in both The
ViewfromNowhere and
The Last Word. It'sNagel’s
notion of “transcendence” which makes clear to me what drives
him: the desire to escape from human
finitude (especially
as it's represented in language). Christopher Norris neatly sums up
the belief and desire that

"...reason can somehow dispense with language and arrive at a pure
self-authenticating truth or method...philosophy strives to efface
its textual or written character..." (Norris, 1982, 19)

Despite
the passage above, many philosophers sympathetic to Nagel would say
that the claim that Nagel is trying “dispense with language” is
simply not on. It's the position of a straw-man Nagel. Nagel, they
may say, is simply arguing that there are “concepts” and modes of
reasoning which come before, or at least ground, all languages. Though,
they go on to say, of course Nagel would equally believe that
everything
(even realist and objectivist philosophy) would need to be articulated
in some language or other. Put in this way: “relativists” or
“anti-realists” may have fewer problems with Nagel’s position
(though they would still have something to say how the former was
expressed). However, Nagel is saying much
more than that.

Perhaps if I compare two quotes it will help matters. Compare

"...we have, in
our ability to apprehend [the] Forms, an avenue to knowledge of them
which is independent of language." (White, 1976, 228)

with Nagel’s
assertion that there is a "view from
outside of language" (1997, 51).

So let’s get
to the source of all these views, the Master himself, Plato:

"…he
attains to the purest knowledge of them [the Forms] who goes to each
with the mind alone, not introducing or intruding in the act of
thought sight or any other sense together with reason, but with the
very light of the mind in her own clearness searches into the very
truth of each [form]…" (Phaedo,
65A)

"At
present we are only agreed about the name, but of the thing to which
we both apply the name possibly you have one notion and I another;
whereas we ought always to come to an understanding about the thing
itself…and not merely about the name…" (Sophist,
218A)

"…the living word of knowledge which has a soul,
and of which the written word is properly no more than an image?…he
will not seriously incline to “write” his thoughts “in water”
with pen and ink, sowing words which can neither speak for themselves
nor teach the truth adequately to others?" (Phaedrus, 275B)

".... the
eye and the ear and the other senses are full of deception, and
persuading her [Philosophy] to retire from them…and be gathered up
and collected into herself, bidding her trust in herself and her own
pure apprehension of pure existence, and to mistrust whatever comes
to her through other channels and is subject to variation…" (Phaedo,
82B)

".... they
think [modern philosophers] that there is nothing stable or
permanent, but only flux and motion…" (Cratylus,
411A)

A “view from
outside language” isn't something I've personally experienced.
However, having said that, it's hard to even imagine what it would
be like. The apprehension of “Forms” that would be “independent
of language” would be strange indeed, primarily because the
Forms (the platonic Forms at least) were the invention of
language – that is, Plato’s language. This isn't to say , a la
John Searle’s critique of Derrida, that Forms are “nothing but text”; only that someone who'd never read Plato (or his surrogates)
would never have any idea what Forms are. It's language that brings
us to the Forms, even if they're not literal fictions themselves.
Even Plato himself would have been brought to the Forms by
language, whatever form his mystical relation with them actually
took. Even if there were some kind non-linguistic and
non-causal mystical or intuitive confrontation with the Forms, it
would have been language that took Plato to them. (This is similar to
the New York Zen Buddhist who attempts to annihilate thought or
“discursive reasoning”; though only after a decision which was the
result of much thought and discursive reasoning.) The above position is tacit on almost every page of The
LastWord.Nagel also
make the mistake of jumping from 1)
No particular
language is necessary for reasoning and the expression of concepts.to 2)
No language at
all is necessary for
reasoning and the expression of concepts. (1997, chapter )This
is analogous to the mistake of believing that if a proposition can be
expressed by different sentential formulations, then it must be
independent of all sentential formulations.At an obvious level, how
would reasoning and the use of concepts be expressed without some
form of contingent language? Would it be like rotating a mental image
within the mind? Perhaps Nagel's talking about logical reasoning. Though
if logical reasoning isn't itself linguistic, it's often (or always) embedded within a linguistic context and the result of linguistic
reasonings. Even modus ponens will be so embedded. Even if we take
the variables or letter names as self-referential, we would be doing
so from some linguistic point, as it were. Perhaps that point would be
proving that not all reasoning is linguistic reasoning. Even if modus
ponens has some kind of Fregean or platonic existence
non-spatiotemporally, acts of reasoning applying modus ponens
occur within linguistic contextualisations. This
isn’t, I don’t think, a commitment to any kind psychologism about
logical reasoning. It's psychologistic about only the reasoning
itself. Modus ponens may well have existence before minds; though this
doesn’t help Nagel’s platonist position. In any case, even if the
letter names and variables are taken as non-referring, we still have
languages of logic. We can say, platonistically, that the logical
scheme, or their parts, refer to abstract objects. Again, the
abstract objects may be mind-independent; though the language isn’t.Specifically,
it's the “spiritually degenerate” position of the late
Wittgenstein that particularly irks Nagel (the one which would deny 2
above). Firstly, he
puts forward what he sees as the major late-Wittgensteinian claim:

".. it makes
sense to say that someone is or is not using a concept correctly only
against the background of the possibility of agreement and
identifiable disagreement in judgments employing the concept..." (1988,
105-6)

What’s wrong with that? How would the
correctness of concept-use be judged? By the philosopher himself and
the philosopher alone? Would he therefore be creating a philosophical
private language? Perhaps they need to match up with platonic-like
Forms of concepts. If they mirror such Forms, the concept is the
correct one or it's being used correctly.

Clearly these Nagelian
concepts share a lot with propositions that are simply clothed with
sentences. Though, again, none gain their identity from them. We express the
proposition and we express the concept. We're required to tell the
truth about the concept. Indeed Nagel seems to be taking the position of
conceptualism, in which universals are concepts or concepts are
universals. The picture he paints of concepts seems to suggest that
they're non-spatiotemporal universals or Forms. More than that: he's a conceptual realist. Nagelian concepts are mind-independent; though
common to many minds. It's hard to be clear, however, about all this
because Nagel rarely goes into the minutiae of his positions on
concepts and the rest.Nagel
clearly thinks that language shouldn't be boss. Perhaps more than
that - in style of Plato - he thinks language is a hindrance to pure
thought. He wants to see the world with an “unclouded eye”. Nagel
wants concepts and even reasonings to be utterly free - per
impossible - from language. In other words, philosophers would be
giving up “the ambition of transcendence” if they weren't
sceptical about language. They would be held in chains by
something as contingent as language. As I’ve said, Nagel’s
distaste for language strikes me as having parallels with Plato’s
distaste for the senses. Plato transcended into the world of Forms
(see passages above). Nagel would like to get free from language and
inhabit the view from Nowhere. It's made clear again and again
that Nagel sees those philosophers who don’t share his Platonic
dreams as spiritually degenerate and, what’s more, as making
philosophy “shallow” (1988, 11-12). Basically, it’s the old
not-really-philosophy
accusation again (traditionally aimed at many great philosophers,
from Descartes to Derrida). Wittgenstein, Rorty, Sellars et al are
“sick of the subject and glad to be rid of its problems”. More
peculiarly, Nagel thinks that they're going “against the
philosophical impulse itself”. So just as Chomsky argues that there
is a “language faculty” in the brain, so Nagel argues that there
is a philosophy faculty
there too. More than that: a faculty (a philosophy machine) with a
fixed stock of ahistorical and acultural questions and concepts (its
data) which make up the a priori of all philosophical thought from
the Philosophy Department of New York University to the Polynesian Isles.
Such things are what “spring eternal from the human heart”.In fact it's
worth noting that it's the late Wittgenstein rather than, say,
Derrida who “endangers” philosophy. This makes a lot of sense
when bearing in mind that many analytic philosophers have claimed
Wittgenstein as one of them. Therefore he's more directly responsible
for the fact that the cancer of “linguistic idealism” has spread
to the analytic philosophy department than anyone else. Let’s not
forget here that, after all, Wittgenstein offers arguments; though
Derrida doesn’t (so they say). Again, it's philosophical
transcendence that is at threat from Wittgenstein because his
position “depends on a position so radical that it...undermines the
weaker transcendent pretensions of even the least philosophical of
thoughts” (1986, 106-107).There's no question about it. The “obsession” with language has
“contributed to the devaluation of reason” (1997, 37). Nagel doesn't mince his words here. He says that this has resulted in a
“decadence”. But why? Well, it’s that old bogeyman again:
psychologism.
If we stress the importance of language (which is contingent), we're
in effect stressing the contingencies of psychology too. It's
this approach that “leads to relativism” (1997, 37). What we
should want, instead, are things that are objective, absolute, eternal,
necessary and certain. What Nagel is after is in a sense something
distinctly non-human - or at least non-social. Something that doesn’t
smell of sweat. More prosaically, something that is non-naturalistic.
For Nagel this includes his “mind-independent concepts” (1997,
37). Just as for Husserl it was the “essences” which remained
after the nonformal had been bracketed. For Brentano it was mentality
itself. For Tractarian Wittgenstein it was his “logical objects”.
For Kant it was his a priori concepts and categories. For Plato it
was his Forms. And for Dummett it is meaning and the invariants of
language. (Perhaps this is why Dummett also thinks that if we fully
took on board the positions advanced in the Philosophical
Investigations we
would be denied a systematic theory of meaning. See Dummett, 1978)

For
Nagel, language is a mere
contingent phenomenon. What we require is the “logic of thought”
instead (1997, 37). That is,

"...the system
of concepts that makes thought possible and to which any
language...must conform." (1997, 37-38)

Clearly,
this squares well with Frege’s notion of a “common stock of
thoughts” (Frege, 1956, pp.289-311).

Nagel is
explicit about his anti-naturalistic position. A position that
follows from the quote above:

"We cannot account for reason by means of a naturalistic
description of the practices of language...reasoning [does not] admit
of naturalistic or psychological or sociological analysis." (1997, 38)

In other
words, reason is indeed ahistorical. It's the matrix within which
every rational human being must work, whether it's the mother who's
cleaning toilets at Oxford University or the Cambridge University
analytic philosopher at a wine-tasting party next door. If the
cleaner is fundamentally at odds with the analytic philosopher, it's
because she has misused her “ahistorical matrix” – her reason.
In this sense, Nagel is a thoroughbred Kantian despite his realist
criticisms of Kant’s “transcendental idealism” (1997, chapter
5).

It's not just “concepts” or Fregean Thoughts that are
non-natural; reason is too. Nagel quotes C.S. Peirce who says that
reason has nothing to do with “how we think”. Nagel elaborates by
saying that if “we can reason, it is because our thoughts can obey
the order of the logical relations among propositions” (1997, 129).
Of course this doesn’t take into account where the propositions
(some think that these can be “mind-independent” too) come from
in the first place. Even if the entailments, inferences and other
relations between propositions are indeed necessary and timeless,
most of what we actually think about has empirical content. As
Wittgenstein himself said, it is what is left after we’ve got the
logic out of the way that's important. Despite his constant
citations of “concepts” and the givens
of reason, this is
precisely what Nagel thinks too.

Transcendence,
Ineffability and Mind

"...the total
world-view of modern man [has] let itself be determined by the
positive sciences...[which has resulted in] an indifferent
turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine
humanity." (Husserl, 1936)

I
shan’t be discussing the pros and cons of a Nagelian or
anti-Nagelian position on mind because I shall try to keep to my
remit and make clear what it is about Nagel’s position on mind -
beyond the technical
debates - which shows him to be takingan ancient and
quasi-religious or mysterian stance on the human subject.
That stance being a never-ceasing desire to keep man securely away
from any attempts to naturalise him.

This desire, of course, has a
long and venerable tradition dating back to the ancient Greeks. A
whole host of characteristics of the human subject have been put
forward as truly distinguishing us from not only all the other
animals; but also the rest of the universe.Originally, man was “the
only rational animal” (laughter was also offered up by Aristotle).
Then we had, in no particular order, the mind, the soul, the love of
God, language, free will, “complex social structures” and so on.
More recently, the distinguishing features of man have been meaning
(a derivation of the language theme) and intentionality. However,
these characteristics were what were meant to distinguish man from
everything else in the universe. The problem with that enterprise is
that although there may well be features of man that distinguish us
from everything else in the universe, everything else in the universe
probably has distinctive features that differentiate themselves from
us. (For example, having a hundred legs or being able to survive a
mile under water.) This craving for distinctiveness is probably no
different in kind from that of one nation differentiating itself from
another. Though there is another manoeuvre, of more recent origin. That
is, the stressing of aspects of man that can’t be naturalistically
reduced to straightforwardly physical/empirical features. Here we
have intentionality again, semantics, “raw feels”, the “the
intrinsic nature of the first-person perspective”, and, perhaps
most recently, qualia.

The
main threat against Nagelian mysticism or mysterianism is posed by
“Darwinist imperialism” (1997, 133). What Darwinism does,
according to Nagel, is “eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as
fundamental features of the world” (1997, 131). My immediate
reaction to that is that the vast majority of Darwininians probably
don’t have anything at all to say about “meaning”. So Nagel
must be talking here about Darwinist philosophers
of mind like, say,
Dennett. Does "naturalistically reducing" automatically
mean elimination?
The old religious account of “purpose” may well be eliminated; though what of meaning? (There are very few semantic
eliminativists, and even extensionalists would keep certain semantic
terms for convenience’s sake.) As for “design”, it depends on
what Nagel means. And, in any case, even many Christians have
finessed their views on the world’s “design” by taking into
account Darwinism. Perhaps I'm misinterpreting Nagel’s reference
to the world’s “design”: after all, he does claim to be an
atheist.More
broadly, what the Darwinian picture offers us is a denial of Nagel’s
assertion that “mind is an irreducible and nonaccidental part” of
the “cosmic order” (1997, 133). I suspect that not all Darwinists
(certainly not all physicalists) believe that the mind is in fact
reducible (see Donald Davidson, 1980); though all most certainly do
believe that mind is an “accidental” result of biological
evolution and all the cosmic physical processes that preceded it.
Again, bearing in mind that Nagel claims to be an atheist, what can
he mean by saying that the mind is a “nonaccidental part [of the]
cosmic order”? And it depends on what he means by “reduction” or
the mind being “reducible”. Perhaps the mind can’t be reduced
in the way a table can’t be reduced (to atoms and molecules)
without losing its essential tablehood, as it were. (Physicists
wouldn’t be the ones that explain to us that tables are for eating
on or for playing tennis on.) Perhaps Nagel should have said that the
mind is not eliminable
rather “irreducible”.Nagel offers
us another criticism of the Darwinian story of mind. He lets Mark
Johnston articulate it:

"Why is the natural order such as to make the appearance of
rational beings likely?" (1997, 138)

According
to Nagel, the only acceptable answer to the above question must be a
“teleological” one (1997, 138). And I can’t help thinking that
whenever teleological explanations are brought to bear on the
appearance of mind (or Soul),
then that telos
is invariably God. (Keep in mind. Nagel’s earlier reference to
“design”.) Perhaps Nagel simply realises that any mention of
“design”, “teleology”, the “nonaccidental appearance of
mind” and its “irreducibility” within a theistic/ Christian
framework, would make other analytic philosophers take him less
seriously. Swinburne, Plantinga etc. are of course explicit about
their theistic/Christian beliefs; though they tend not to impose such views
on all areas of their research and work. (For example,
Swinburne’s paper on personal identity is an explicit commitment,
if not a reworking, of the Christian position on the self/soul and
Plantinga does slip God or “God” into many of his papers.)

Again,
it is in Nagel’s attitude to reason
that the philosopher’s quasi-mysticism or mysterianism can be seen.
For example, why does he feel the need to say that the “basic
methods of reasoning we employ are not merelyhuman”
(1997, 140)? What could that possibly mean other than a
religious/mystical meaning? To put it starkly, I think, and have good
reason to think, that Nagel believes that reason and mind are not
“human”. He believes that reason is a faculty of a
Platonic/Judeo-Christian non-extended, non-corporeal soul.

Another
mantra of Nagel's is that human
subjects are not objects.
This position is clearly seen in certain debates in the philosophy of
mind. More precisely, Nagel vehemently rejects all attempts to what
may be called scientise
the mind. This can be seen in the on-running third/first person
debate. As a self-confessed Cartesian, there is something about the
first-person perspective that could never, even in principle, be
caught by the third-person language of science. Nagel thinks that no
scientist could ever tell us “what it is like to be a bat” or
what it is like to be Thomas Nagel. (1979).Most of
Nagel’s anti-naturalistic fire has been aimed at those who have
attempted to naturalise (or reduce or eliminate) intentionality and
qualia:

"Intentionality cannot be naturalistically analysed...nor can it be
given naturalistically sufficient conditions. It is not to be
captured by either physical or phenomenological description." (1997,
42)

That
is, whatever we say about the evolutionary heritage of intentionality
(if there even is such a thing), or the physics and neurobiology which
underpins it, we could never, as it were, indulge in a priori
reasoning to satisfactorily arrive at the effect (i.e.,
intentionality) exclusively from the causes (i.e., natural
conditions). And even if we work backwards with purely a posteriori
reasoning from the phenomenon of intentionality itself, natural
conditions may be necessary; though they would never be sufficient for a
satisfactory explanation of intentionality. In fact, intentionality
is something (or has
something) that the rest of the universe simply doesn’t have. It
sticks out like a sore thumb both in nature and in the minds of
non-naturalist and mysterian philosophers (even the odd physicist and
even odder biologists). As Brentano argued over 100 years ago,
“aboutness” is irreducible.

Despite this, Nagel thinks that he
can place intentionality outside the causal nexus and still claim
that

"it is possible to accept a worldview that does not explain
everything in terms of quantum field theory without necessarily
believing in God". (1997, 131)

However, there
is a but of some kind. And here it is:

"...it seems hardly credible that its [the mind’s] appearance
should be a natural accident, like the fact that there are mammals."
(1997, 132)